


Moonlit

by TheDragon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Violence, Captivity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 15:30:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15270555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDragon/pseuds/TheDragon
Summary: Prince Arthur is a werwulf – the one thing Camelot hates more than sorcerers. He was bitten  back when he was 19, and he vividly remembers spending his first full moon running through the forest, killing every animal in sight.Nowadays, Arthur hides away on full moons. There's a corridor in the dungeons, with many cells that have certainly seen better days. Arthur spends the whole night locked and shackled in a cell at the end of the corridor, praying to any god that will listen that no one hears his snarls.He's been lucky these past few years. Very, very lucky.Unfortunately, it seems his luck has run out.~oOo~Merlin had always suspected that there was something Arthur wasn't telling him. Not that he can complain, seeing as he is keeping a few secrets of his own, but they've been lovers for years now, and really, someone had to slip up sooner or later.He's still not sure how they ended up chained up in some sort of cell with his magic suppressed. In any case, he's starting to wish he had his magic, because it's a full moon out tonight and Arthur is transforming into a werwulf in front of his very eyes.And Merlin has nowhere to run.





	Moonlit

**Author's Note:**

> ~~Wow I actually managed to sit down and write something!~~
> 
> I'd like to thank my betas for helping me with this fic <3 The idea came to me sometime during last year's Pornalot fest.

If not for the fact that Merlin is sitting across from him, small and terrified and counting on Arthur to have a plan that will somehow get the both of them out of this, Arthur would have hit the wall and screamed his heart out.

Everything had been going so well – _of course_ something had to go wrong sooner or later. It had gone wrong sooner, obviously – if there was one thing he was lacking these days, it was luck; he’d probably managed to use up his entire lifetime supply over the last few years.

“Arthur?” Merlin asks from across the room, where he’s chained to the wall. He’s pale with fear, and Arthur wants nothing more than to break through his own chains, rip the cell door off its hinges, and rip out those mercenaries’ throats with his teeth and watch as they scream, as they yell, as they writhe and bleed upon the gro–

No. _No_. That’s the full moon talking. He has to stay calm.

“Arthur?” Merlin asks again, but Arthur can feel his nails getting longer and beginning to bite into the flesh of his hands, and his teeth are getting sharper and _gods damn it_ , he can’t look up at Merlin looking like this. He just _can’t_. He won’t be the one to put more fear on Merlin’s face.

He remembers when he first got bitten, back when he’d been nineteen and had thought it would be fun to spend the night outside the safe walls of the citadel. He hadn’t even spared a thought for the full moon. Why should he have, when his father had spent half his life going around and boasting about how he’d gotten rid of every sorcerer and werwulf in the kingdom?

He still considers himself lucky that he hadn’t been killed that night, though he does sometimes wonder if that wouldn’t have been the better alternative. At least that way, he wouldn’t have to live in the fear that one day, someone would wander through the abandoned hallways, down into the deepest reaches of the dungeons where the cells are too dilapidated to hold prisoners, and come upon him changing into an enormous wolf.

He’d be dragged off to his own execution before he could so much as bare his teeth.

And now, years later, he wouldn’t be held captive by mercenaries working for… for… for whoever it was they were working for, probably hoping to ransom him, and he wouldn’t be stuck in a cell with the one person he cherishes above all others _on the night of the full moon_.

“Are you alright?” Merlin asks, and Arthur has to grit his teeth so as not to growl at him. There’s some moonlight coming in through the small window – nothing more than a slit in the wall, really – and it lands in the middle of Arthur’s chest, right over his heart. He shivers as the urge to transform begins to overwhelm him.

“Can you get out?” he asks Merlin, digging his claws further into the palms of his hands, keeping his fists clenched so hard that they start to bleed. His voice sounds gravelly, which is probably the reason Merlin reaches out to him in concern.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Merlin says, but when Arthur hangs his head to look at the floor of the dingy cell, Merlin relents and tests the strength of his shackles. Arthur flinches when the rattle of the chains reaches his oversensitive ears. “I can’t.”

Arthur fights not to show how much the words affect him. Merlin is stuck in a cell with him on the night of the full moon, with no barriers between them, no weapons, no _nothing_. He can feel tears running from his eyes, making their way down his cheeks and dripping from his chin onto the filthy ground below, and he hangs his head even lower so that Merlin won’t be able to see them.

“Merlin, listen to me,” Arthur says. A quick glance upward tells him that Merlin’s eyes are on him again, wide and fearful, hand reaching out to Arthur. He looks like he wants to say something, but Arthur won’t be interrupted, _can’t_ be interrupted because he doesn’t know how much time he has left and he _has_ to get these next words out. “Don’t move, don’t speak. Stay as quiet as you can. Don’t–” he breaks off and gasps as his head suddenly goes fuzzy. “Don’t draw any attention to yourself,” he finishes, but the words come out so strangled that he’s not sure Merlin can understand them.

Arthur opens his mouth to repeat himself, just in case he actually was unintelligible, but the next thing he knows, there’s a fire raging through his body and fur everywhere, and the shackles around his wrists and ankles are tightening painfully, then snapping open as his limbs grow too large for them. Then, it’s like someone’s closed a curtain in front of his eyes and the world goes dark around him.

~oOo~

Merlin doesn’t know how these mercenaries got the idea to shackle him with cold iron. Maybe it was the only thing they’d had on hand. Maybe they’d heard about a sorcerer serving Arthur and had taken the rumor a bit too literally.

Unfortunately, no matter what the scenario, it ends up working in their favour.

Merlin had tried to access his magic despite the shackles, hopeful to find even a sliver, even a _mote_ of power, but it wasn’t there – or if it was, then it was buried so deeply that he couldn’t sense it at all. He felt – _still_ feels – bereft without it, like there’s a cavity inside his chest where his magic used to reside. He’s disconnected from everything around him and he’d give _anything_ to have even an _iota_ of his magic back.

It isn’t all bad, though. He’s in a cell, but at least he’s with Arthur, and he can always count on Arthur to come up with a plan that can get them out of such a situation. Granted, he has absolutely no idea what that plan could be, considering that the both of them are chained up and locked in, but there’s certain to be a plan. There’s always a plan, sooner or later.

Seeing just how quiet Arthur’s been this past hour, it’s probably going to be later.

( _Or never_ , his mind tries to warn him, _maybe not this time_ , but in that direction madness lies.)

Overall, he’s not too worried, up until the moment Arthur goes all pale and sickly, until Arthur starts warning him to be quiet. Not to ‘shut up’, just to ‘be quiet’; he’s not sure he likes it when Arthur is this serious.

When Arthur starts shifting right in front of him, when fur bursts out from under his skin and his teeth get longer and his eyes start glowing, Merlin becomes a bit more worried than he was, granted, and very much shocked (because _really_ , it’s not like anyone would _expect_ to see something like this happen to another person, least of all the Crown Prince of Camelot), but it’s only when Arthur starts growling at him that shivers of fear start running up and down his spine.

A werwulf. Arthur is a _werwulf_ – the one thing that Camelot despises more than sorcerers.

And Merlin is stuck in a cell with him on the night of the full moon.

He wants to laugh hysterically, because if anything, he’d thought his secret would come out first. He’d been aware that Arthur was keeping something from him; they’d been sharing Arthur’s bed for years now, and they’d been friends even longer. He wasn’t so oblivious that he couldn’t tell Arthur was keeping something from him. Still, he’d thought, perhaps somewhat irrationally, that his magic would be revealed first since it was so hard to hide. After all, sometimes it seemed as though he did magic on a daily basis, either to protect Arthur or to make his own workload lighter. He disappeared almost on a daily basis, while Arthur disappeared what? Once a month?

Conveniently, he now realises, on the night of the full moon?

Merlin wants to hit himself for how stupid he’s been, but he doesn’t, because Arthur told him to stay as quiet as he can and now he can kind of see why.

But then his foot twitches involuntarily and the chains rattle, and Merlin comes to the belated realisation that keeping quiet has never been his forte.

Arthur’s – the wolf’s? – head swivels around at the sound, and he gets down on his haunches, growling at Merlin. Merlin slowly moves back until he’s right up against the wall, flinching when it makes the chains rattle again.

Great. Not even a minute has passed, and he’s already managed to do everything Arthur had told him not to do.

Arthur stalks toward him, and when did he break through his own shackles, anyway? Merlin freezes where he’s propped up against the wall, unable to do anything but watch as the giant wolf comes closer. He wants his magic back; to throw up a shield and protect himself, or to somehow push Arthur back, or even to bring the fort down around them and get the both of them out of here before anyone – namely, Merlin – gets hurt because werwulfas are known for one thing only, and it isn’t their self-control.

As Arthur stands above him, instinct tells Merlin to look away and bare his throat, so, pulse quickening, he does exactly that. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Arthur leaning toward him, teeth bared. Merlin stays stock-still as Arthur moves his nose to the side of Merlin’s neck, right above the pulse point, and sniffs at him. He stays like that for a few seconds, during which the only thoughts going through Merlin’s head are something along the lines of, _This is it!_ (except they’re much less intelligible) _,_ and Merlin fights not to let a single muscle twitch lest Arthur decide that ripping Merlin’s throat out would, in fact, be a good idea.

Nothing like that happens. Arthur draws away from his neck, nosing at Merlin’s jaw as he goes, then lies down at his feet, putting his muzzle near one of Merlin’s hands. Merlin stares at him, heart pounding against his ribcage so hard that he’s starting to fear it might actually break through the bones and out of his chest.

At that exact moment, a small group of mercenaries decides to grace the two of them with their presence, and fuck, how did he miss the sound of so many footsteps? There are three of them that Merlin can see through the little barred window at the top of the cell door, and the light surrounding them suggests they have a torch. The one in the front has eyebrows bushier than Gaius’s, which, up until this point, Merlin hadn’t thought was possible. He must be the leader, Merlin decides, because the remaining two men seem to be a step behind him.

There’s the sound of keys jingling at someone’s belt, and then the door is banging open and Merlin is greeted with an unrestricted view of their captors.

The one to his left has boots that look to be at least two times bigger than Merlin’s own, and are his feet _really_ that big or is he compensating for something? The last one is the most ordinary-looking of the lot; he’s missing a tooth in the front of his mouth, and Merlin viciously hopes that Arthur was the one who knocked it out.

There’s barely any light, and their eyes must not be accustomed to the semi-darkness, or maybe it’s just that Arthur’s fur is so dark against the ground that it makes him almost invisible? That’s how Merlin tries to explain how they don’t immediately see the giant wolf at his feet and their second captive gone.

“Get up,” Eyebrows demands, waving the torch along with his hands, but the second he tries to take a step toward them, Arthur is up and snapping at him with his teeth, hackles up and tail raised high.

“What the fuck?!” Eyebrows shouts, dropping the torch to the ground and reaching for the sword at his side. The other two are quick to follow. They don’t try to go any further into the cell, and instead opt to wait for Arthur to make the first move.

Arthur doesn’t. He stays where he is – standing defensively in front of Merlin.

“Oh, fuck this,” Eyebrows shouts, moving into the cell and swinging the sword at Arthur. Arthur dodges it easily, then lunges at the man’s neck, teeth bared and ready to rip out his windpipe. He lets out and agonized scream when Arthur’s canines implant themselves in the man’s forearm.

The remaining two men file inside and head straight for Merlin.

While Arthur is distracted, Boots gets to Merlin and puts a knife to his throat. Merlin flinches at the rancid smell of his breath, at the prick of the knife, at the feeling of blood slowly beginning to trickle down the line of his throat and pool in the dip above his sternum.

Boots doesn’t get the chance to say anything before Arthur swivels around, alerted to the situation by the scent of blood.

“Back off!” Boots shouts, pupils wide with fear, and Merlin wrinkles his nose as the smell of his breath hits him again.

Arthur snarls, but obeys. Merlin distantly wonders how much humanity is left in him – whether he can actually understand the words or is instinctively reacting to the threat on Merlin’s life. Merlin can do nothing but watch in despair as the remaining mercenaries corral Arthur into the corner.

“Fuck this!” Gap exclaims, nervously wiping his free hand on his trousers. “Morgana didn’t say nothin’ bout a werwulf!”

“No one wants to hear your whinging,” Eyebrows snaps back, eyes never leaving Arthur’s growling form. “So shut up.”

Gap takes an involuntary step back when Arthur’s growls get louder, and Merlin flinches once again as the knife presses deeper into his throat.

“For fuck’s sake! Can’t we kill it?” Boots asks resentfully, looking at Eyebrows in askance.

“Have you taken leave of your senses? Do you have any idea what Morgana will do to us if we bring him back dead? Werwulfas will be the least of your fucking worries,” Eyebrows warns, voice shaky and arm dripping with blood.

Merlin tunes them out after that. His mind races through all the self-defence techniques Arthur has taught him, but he finds himself unable to move until Gap stalks towards Arthur, raising the sword up high over his head.

“Fuck this,” he seethes, and when Merlin notices him standing above Arthur, sword ready to slash right through him, he sees red.

He brings his arms up, as though in capitulation, but then within a split second he’s got the fingers of his left hand curled around the arm holding the knife and is pulling it down and away from his neck, while using his right arm to block any possible movement of the knife across his throat.

Then, he bites down. _Hard_.

The man screams and lets the knife drop from his hand, and that’s all Arthur needs before he’s lunging at Gap and tearing his throat out before anyone has the chance to react.

Gap dies quickly, but not painlessly.

Merlin twists around to face Eyebrows, and a split second after that, he finds himself having to defend against a punch to the face.

He reacts thanks to muscle memory alone and inwardly thanks Arthur for not letting him worm his way out of training. He lifts his arms in front of his face and pushes his forearms against his opponent’s upper arm. From there, it’s easy to move his body to the side, to elbow the man in the face. While he’s stunned, Merlin grips him by the back of his jacket and knees him in the groin once, twice, and again and again until Eyebrows falls further back than the chains around Merlin’s extremities will permit him to go.

When he turns around, Boots is lying dead on the floor right next to Gap, and Arthur is shoving past him to get to the last man. Merlin looks away when Arthur kills him, too.

He only looks up when he hears a jingling near his ear. Arthur is standing at his side, head raised up and eyes looking straight at him. He’s got the keys to Merlin’s shackles between his teeth. He noses at Merlin’s hand until Merlin moves to take them from him, lip curling in disgust when he feels the warm stickiness of blood on Arthur’s muzzle.

While Merlin just stands there, doing nothing but staring at the keys in the limited light, Arthur starts nosing at his wrist and whining deep in his throat.

“Alright, okay,” Merlin says, voice and hands both shaky now that the adrenaline has worn off. He lifts the keys to his left wrist first and chooses one at random. It goes inside easily, but the mechanism is a bit rusted, which makes it hard to turn. Thankfully, after about half a minute of fiddling, Merlin finally manages to free his hand. He shakes it out, revelling in his newfound freedom, and then proceeds to make quick work of the remaining bindings.

Arthur waits at his side patiently, nosing and licking at the places where Merlin’s wrists have been rubbed raw with metal, where the cold iron has burned bright red rings into his skin.

He gets in one sharp intake of breath before the full force of his magic hits him and he’s suddenly shaking his way down to the floor, biting back screams that threaten to claw their way out of his throat. He can just barely make out the sound of Arthur’s worried whimpers somewhere above him, can just barely feel the wet trail Arthur’s nose leaves right under his jaw, the concerned pawing at his leg. He shakes, and he shakes, and he shakes, the magic pressing in on him from all sides, feeling like it’s never going to stop, like it’s going to suffocate him.

And then it _does_ stop, and Merlin is left on the floor, gasping for breath and more than a bit out of it.

There’s an unpleasant feeling in his stomach, like he’s eaten something bad or perhaps he’s on a boat? That would, at least, explain why the cell he’s in is swaying from side to side, why the floor is moving under him, threatening to throw him to the rough waters should he move so much as an inch.  
  
Merlin closes his eyes and spends a few minutes just breathing.  
  
It takes a while before he finally comes to his senses, before he finds the strength to sit up, but his stomach still rolls uncomfortably and the all-consuming stench of blood and rot does nothing to help the situation. He spares but a moment to put his head between his knees and get a hold of himself, and then he's pushing up, off the floor and onto his feet. He sways a little to the side – first to the left, then to the right. It gets worse when he tries to take his first steps. He blinks, and suddenly there's a warmth at his side, suddenly there's _Arthur_ , looking up at him imploringly. Hesitantly, Merlin places a hand upon Arthur's back, lets Arthur take some of his weight.  
  
"Let's go," Merlin whispers, his voice hoarse. Arthur moves his gaze from Merlin’s face to the door and takes a small, careful step forward, waiting for Merlin to follow.

Merlin does. Step by step, he lets Arthur lead them through the fort. They walk through the dark corridors for ages, stopping whenever they hear something, praying to any god that will listen that they don’t come across any more enemies, that no one sounds the alarm that their prisoners have escaped.

It takes a while for them to come across fresh forest air. Merlin breathes it in greedily, gulps it down like it’s something he’s been deprived of for far too long.

As soon as he’s had his fill, Merlin turns around and makes sure to set fire to the fort.

"You and I are going to have a talk when you change back," Merlin informs Arthur once they're far away from that burning wreck of a building, from the screams of those still trapped inside, once they’re standing on an open field beneath the full moon. Arthur merely looks back at him and snorts derisively, then bites down on Merlin’s sleeve and tugs on it, urging him to move.

Merlin smiles and does as he is bid.


End file.
